SACRAMENTO — If it’s no big deal for nearly 4 million Californians to go without a state senator, it’s worth asking: Why do we have a state Senate at all?

The question isn’t as nutty as you might think.

For years, Californians have debated the merits of essentially cutting the Legislature in half. Similar to most states, California has a bicameral, or two-house, Legislature, composed of the Senate and the Assembly. Nebraska has a unicameral Legislature, composed of only one house.

Reformers wonder whether a unicameral could work here.

“Why in the world do we have a two-house Legislature?” asked Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the American Prospect, in a 2009 Los Angeles Times op-ed. “What does the state Senate do that the Assembly doesn’t, and vice versa? In the name of fostering transparency, ending gridlock, curtailing backroom deals and creating a more responsive government, why doesn’t California just abolish the Senate and create a larger Assembly?”

The state Senate, arguably, could be expendable because state legislatures are different than the U.S. Congress.

If you recall from your elementary school civics classes, the two houses of Congress stem from a disagreement over representation. Some delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 thought representation in Congress should be based on a state’s population. Others thought each state should get the same number of votes.

The compromise: Congress has two houses, one where states have an equal number of votes (the U.S. Senate) and one where more populous states have more votes (the U.S. House of Representatives).

In the years that followed, many state legislatures copied this structure, including California’s. For decades, the 40 seats in the California State Senate were divided among California’s 58 counties, with some senators representing a single county and others representing multiple rural counties.

This lasted until the 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state legislative districts must represent the same number of people under the “one person, one vote” principle. (The U.S. Senate was excluded from the ruling.) After that, the members of the state Senate were elected in districts of roughly the same population — just like members of the State Assembly.

Today, the only difference between members of the state Assembly and state Senate is the size of their districts.

“Once you do that, there’s no reason to have a state Senate,” said Joe Mathews, California editor of Zócalo Public Square and co-author of “California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It.”

Mathews said having a state Senate and a state Assembly just doubles the number of dark alleys where political shenanigans can take place. “It’s a real problem,” he said.

Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga — a Nebraska native — has periodically mused about the idea but has never formally proposed a change. “California is too big to be unicameral, and there’s too much diversity,” Dutton said.

Jack Pitney, government professor at Claremont McKenna College, says having two houses is one of the primary benefits of our legislative system.

“In any kind of decision, you want a second set of eyes,” Pitney said “That’s really the whole idea of bicameralism.”

The professor means that the state Senate acts as a check and balance to the state Assembly and vice versa. No bill can get through the Legislature without passing through both houses. Every action of the Legislature is debated twice, reducing the likelihood of bad decisions.

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